From Suharto to Iraq: Nothing Has Changedby John Pilger
www.dissidentvoice.org
October 17, 2005First Published in The New Statesman

“The
propagandist's purpose,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to make one set of
people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” The British,
who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were
specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the
First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C.P.
Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the
truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know,
and can't know.”

What has changed?

"If we had all known then what we know now,"
said the New York Times on 24 August, "the invasion [of Iraq] would
have been stopped by a popular outcry." The admission was saying, in
effect, that powerful newspapers, like powerful broadcasting
organizations, had betrayed their readers and viewers and listeners by not
finding out -- by amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair instead of
challenging and exposing them. The direct consequences were a criminal
invasion called "Shock and Awe" and the dehumanizing of a whole nation.

This remains largely an unspoken shame in
Britain, especially at the BBC, which continues to boast about its rigor
and objectivity while echoing a corrupt and lying government, as it did
before the invasion. For evidence of this, there are two academic studies
available -- though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to be
obvious to any discerning viewer, night after night, as "embedded"
reporting justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as
"rooting out insurgents" and swallows British army propaganda designed to
distract from its disaster, while preparing us for attacks on Iran and
Syria. Like the New York Times and most of the American media, had
the BBC done its job, many thousands of innocent people almost certainly
would be alive today.

When will important journalists cease to be
establishment managers and analyze and confront the critical part they
play in the violence of rapacious governments? An anniversary provides an
opportunity. Forty years ago this month, Major General Suharto began a
seizure of power in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that the
CIA described as "the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th
century." Much of this episode was never reported and remains secret. None
of the reports of recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali mentioned
the fact that near the major hotels were the mass graves of some of an
estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs orchestrated by Suharto and backed
by the American and British governments.

Indeed, the collaboration of Western
governments, together with the role of Western business, laid the pattern
for subsequent Anglo-American violence across the world: such as Chile in
1973, when Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup was backed in Washington and
London; the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret
police; and the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq,
including black propaganda by the Foreign Office which sought to discredit
press reports that he had used nerve gas against the Kurdish village of
Halabja.

In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy
furnished General Suharto with roughly 5,000 names. These were people
targeted for assassination, and a senior American diplomat checked off the
names as they were killed or captured. Most were members of the PKI, the
Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto's
army, Washington secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment
whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security
Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow
Suharto's generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest
echelons of the US administration were listening in.

The Americans worked closely with the
British. The British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, cabled
the Foreign Office: "I have never concealed from you my belief that a
little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to
effective change." The "little shooting" saw off between half a million
and a million people.

However, it was in the field of propaganda,
of "managing" the media and eradicating the victims from people's memory
in the west, that the British shone. British intelligence officers
outlined how the British press and the BBC could be manipulated.
"Treatment will need to be subtle," they wrote, "eg, a) all activities
should be strictly unattributable, b) British [government] participation
or co-operation should be carefully concealed." To achieve this, the
Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD)
in Singapore.

The IRD was a top-secret, cold war
propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty's most
experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the "embedded"
press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret
message that the fake story he had promoted -- that a communist takeover
was imminent in Indonesia -- "went all over the world and back again". He
described how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed "to give
exactly your angle on events in his article... i.e., that this was a
kid-glove coup without butchery".

These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be "put
almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC". Prevented from entering
Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent, was
unaware of the slaughter. "My British sources purported not to know what
was going on," Challis told me, "but they knew what the American plan was.
There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in
Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops
down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible
holocaust. It was only later that we learned that the American embassy was
supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a
deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the
IMF and the World Bank was part of it... Suharto would bring them back.
That was the deal."

The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by
the BBC and the rest of the western media. The headline news was that
"communism" had been overthrown in Indonesia, which, Time reported, "is
the west's best news in Asia". In November 1967, at a conference in Geneva
overseen by the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty was handed
out. All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors, Chase
Manhattan Bank and US Steel to ICI and British American Tobacco. With
Suharto's connivance, the natural riches of his country were carved up.

Suharto's cut was considerable. When he was
finally overthrown in 1998, it was estimated that he had up to 10 billion
dollars in foreign banks, or more than 10 per cent of Indonesia’s foreign
debt. When I was last in Jakarta, I walked to the end of his leafy street
and caught sight of the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in
luxury. As Saddam Hussein heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he
must ask himself where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto's crimes,
Saddam's seem second-division.

With British-supplied Hawk jets and
machine-guns, Suharto's army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of
the population of East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and
machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life
out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport
company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry
Kissinger is "director emeritus".) Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of
the population, have been killed; yet this British-backed "project", as
new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.

What happened in Indonesia, and continues to
happen, is almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries
have riches coveted by the West; both had dictators installed by the west
to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries,
blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda
willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary
distinctions between Saddam's regime ("monstrous") and Suharto's
("moderate" and "stable").

Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to
a number of principled journalists working in the pro-war media, including
the BBC, who say that they and many others "lie awake at night" and want
to speak out and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.

John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and
documentary filmmaker. He is currently a visiting professor at Cornell
University, New York. His
film, Stealing a Nation, about the expulsion of the people of Diego
Garcia, has won the Royal Television Society's award for the best
documentary on British television in 2004-5. His latest book is Tell Me No Lies:
Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (Jonathan Cape, 2004). Visit
John Pilger's website:
www.johnpilger.com. Thanks to Michelle Hunt at Granada Media.